


treble and bass

by Alexis_Hansen



Category: Daft Punk
Genre: Depressing, F/M, Humans, No Slash, break-up, first person POV, no much of anything, thomas pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-03
Updated: 2014-10-03
Packaged: 2018-02-19 13:42:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2390438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alexis_Hansen/pseuds/Alexis_Hansen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>both are keys and both of them work but they just don't fit any more.</i>
</p><p>thomas/élodie gone wrong. this is not a good thing. quiet/depressing</p>
            </blockquote>





	treble and bass

**Author's Note:**

> i don't own anything. 
> 
> not based on truth at all, except maybe for my own  
> which is probably a sign that you should take this with some massive grains of salt

Strange then, that this should be our last time together.  
In the Rue la Condamine we stand in line, gazing into the first building at the end of the road, and what is inside paints the whole street sinister; rows and rows of uncut templates and locks to embrace them, soon to be impressed and painted upon according to the whims of whoever comes along. They sparkle gold and silver, a familiar visual; but today they jangle with malicious dread as we stand here, waiting for a set of your keys to be cut, so I can visit your apartment when you're out and take back all that still remains mine.

The day is cold. A shower outside, so faint that it's nigh imperceptible. Should one be out briefly to post a letter, or to visit the baker, or cycle down the avenue, they'd be met with precipitation so negligible in amount that their clothes would barely be soaked through. A young man cuts through in front of us with an apology before continuing on his way - neither of us acknowledge it - and as he runs off I turn my head and stare at his coat, black and white houndstooth. Slightly oversized. A quick brush down would scatter the drops to the ground; hang it up for ten minutes and it would have dried again, its shape kept for another rainy day. He is lucky, then, that man. We are less so, for even the lightest of rain eventually dampens inwards, and when we are hanging up our own coats we will find them heavier than what we started out with. We wouldn't have noticed it becoming so, but it's the truth. We didn't notice a _lot_ of things. I say this now, but sometime in the next half hour or so, I'll stop noticing, too. It's not much use knowing something if you can't make use of it, or if you're going to forget later.

We knew that too. We simply shrugged our shoulders and forgot.  
How heavy and unfair the price of forgetting is, when it is merely human.

The day is not content to press itself cloudy against the street and all its windows and walls. No, it insists on beating down on us. Somehow that makes me think of you. Another person leaves the shop, tightening their hands in their jeans, and the queue moves inwards. A young lady with the top of her handbag spilling open goes up to the counter - I can just make out her hair, pinned in a neat blonde bun, bobbing slightly as she speaks, nods, and moves away, leaving another to take her place at the counter. She requires a different service, no doubt, perhaps she requires the locksmith to accompany her towards whatever barrier that stands in her way. True to my guess, she emerges not half a minute later, and disappears around the corner while the queue moves again. You look at me looking after her and I ask myself whether you're irritated at me for this, but then I turn to meet your gaze (which you don't avoid) and I see nothing but blankness in your eyes.

I think I'd rather you despised me.  
I think about my having-been-in-love - and wish you were as well, so you'd have had someone to despise.

The wind blew all day, too, during our first date. I raise my face, inhale its bitter indfference mingled in the strict-tempo air. The taste of it is changed now, as such things do; another strong burst billows about your skirt and my prematurely thinning hair, snatching the raindrops nearby and streaking them harsh against the window before it curls about the glass and finally falls asleep.

It is too cold a day to stand outside for long. We only ever meet outside now, so we don't have to see the writings on the walls; but today I am tired and I feel sick. Lifting my left arm I brush the back of my hand across my forehead and it is too warm, which befits a seasonal cold. Out of the corner of my eye I watch you, wondering if you will recognize the gesture; you do not, your eyes too fixed along the uncut display of keys. Or it might be that you did and see no need to acknowledge it, I don't know.  
Whiskey for me, when I return. Neat and hastily drunk, depending on my mood, or warmed with sunflower honey, lemon, cloves and boiling water. Or perhaps not the latter; it will remind me too much of you, who was the first to teach me that recipe. (I always scald the whiskey when I do it, anyway.) After that I will go to bed. Never mind that it's still early. When sleep calls, you bundle yourself into the blankets, fill a water glass with tears, and go to bed until spring comes, whenever that would be. I would have had you once to rouse me, warm and smelling of morning, and kiss the sleep from my eyes and help me out into the world again. (I will do it myself, I'm sure, just without the kisses.) And in case I am _genuinely_ coming down with something, and it is not just my exhaustion talking, I could benefit from a Tamiflu or several, there's an half-full pack you gave me a month or two ago. Having a plan makes this bearable, at least, and I am anxious to move on to the next block in my timetable; when I lick nervously over my bottom lip I can already feel the curl of the capsule upon my tongue, its hard-starch surface faintly sticky-sweet as it goes down.

Scene cuts back to reality. It's unpleasant, but it's all we've got. Your eyelashes long and unblinking, curved as if to smile.  
Yes, old love, you were right to go. What had begun with hope and joy is now nothing but slow torture. I do not blame you for anything, even though I will never say that out loud. Sometimes things like this just happen - just because we can only shrug helplessly to inquiries of what exactly happened, it doesn't mean that it didn't happen, or that it hasn't been affecting.

I do fear our perceived pettiness to the outside world, that somehow because we claim to have simply fallen out of love we will be seen as lazy or lying. But I fear our togetherness even more, and that's just how it is. Away from you I feel a great emptiness, a gnawing, brutal loneliness that you too admitted that you felt. With me however, you have expressed that you had the ever-so-reassuring feeling of wanting to escape, and I reciprocate it. And we have been cruel to each other, during the honeymoon phase of the breakdown, when we could not accept this. I can still picture it. I accuse you with your friends and you do not deny it, even though we both know that I accuse you falsely. In turn you simply look at me and accuse me with my best friend and I do not deny it, even though it is not true.

(He's actually furious. He thinks we are both being hasty. He thinks we are both irresponsible. He refuses to talk to me. He is entirely justified.)

Well, that failure is no more. I've made sure of it. Outwardly you know me. From my father I inherited a stammer, bubbling up as if from a soda bottle in the liquid of my speech; his tired blink, his side-quirked smile. From my mother I inherited a sensitivity to the pain in the pleasure, the ache burned into the arches of my feet should I walk for too long, the thin pale dip in my spine as graceful and tragic as a swan. You know all this, and also that I'm not going to stop being this way for a very long time. But that man you lived with and knew in that way, that Thomas Bangalter _person_ , he is done. He has been done for a _long time_. It was this persona that is done that you were talking to for the past few months, and you knew it well.

Talking in bed ought to be the easiest, but over time it has become harder, secrets and loaded meanings in our casual speech lost as we fell out of touch, until it became impossible to find words both not unkind and not untrue. We are strangers to each other again. Our conversations have become non-sequiturs, meaningful yet not.

I say: "I need to drop Guy off at the Champs-Élysées," and you say: "You'd sleep with anybody, wouldn't you?" (No.)  
You say: "Studying Linguistics did nothing for you," and I say: "It's the fault of the tuna salad." (Yours.)

Whimsy is one thing, nonsense another, failure to talk a great misfortune.  
At watching this drawn-out death of something still so young and softly-warm, you took umbrage, and before either of us knew it, I was gone. It never sunk in properly. I still remember unlocking the door to our once-home and coming back in, taking my shoes off and being greeted by you nonchalantly (stirring green tea) as I sat down next to you and changed the channel; it was over an hour before we suddenly realized that something was amiss, and asked each other why I was here. I think back to it all the time. Now I wonder if I should have stayed and discussed that with you, whether you thought that that was an indication that we still had a chance; but back then, I simply murmured my apologies, swept up my own keys and left.

Perhaps you became steadily colder to me in the days that followed because you were thinking the same thing and I never followed up on it. Or perhaps you genuinely didn't want me around, and your coldness was you being repelled at yourself for being still under the influence of that drug called routine, as anathema as it eventually proved to be. It doesn't matter. What's done remains painfully done.

This is taking too long for the two of us. You step forwards, hesitate, and then back, the thin narrow heel of your boots clicking shallow over cemented cobblestone. The sound is a little too hollow in my ears and I wonder if that stone is _authentic_ , as if that even makes sense. Stone is stone. It's not permanent, and it's arguable what its being _natural_ even means, but you know that it's what it is. Dug up from soil or not, quarried from a cliff, worn smooth by the sea and collected, fragmented from something else and polished deliberately or not, it is what it is. It's not exactly a questionable foundation, a stone being a stone.

I question it anyway. I think we have all the right in the world to do that, for now at least, after _our_ world shook and crumbled apart.

" _Alors_." I break the silence. There's another shop we could go to, just down the road. " _On y va_?"  
" _Pas maintenant_." You say, and stand your ground. We do not move. Whiskey, sleep and Tamiflu.

At least we're closer now. Actually by the door, away from the wind. I pull down my hood, running my hand absentmindedly against the nearest surface. The lining of the doorway, painted wood that's flaking off at the edges. Sunlight peeks shyly through and illuminates the gloss of the paint, reflecting myself in it, lighting up the blank metal keys along the wall like lucky charms along a bracelet.

That was how I was once, when we fist met - uncut key, smooth blade, vertical dreamer waiting for _your_ impression. The milling and grooves of our times together, never to return but permanently and deeply scarring, changing me little by little until our keyways fit shoulder to elbow to hip and then back to our lips. I like your lipstick, by the way. Probably because I _didn't_ buy it for you, and your unchanging beauty makes me feel very relieved. You loved me but never relied on me and that was for the best. As I think this, you move forwards and I follow - ah, there is no more wait any more.

It is our turn, for the cutting of the keys.

You are the one with the original, so it is you who ends up talking to the locksmith. This place is small, quaint, faintly dusty. The door isn't fully shut, so I go to fix that - the one waiting outside kindly helps me with it, but a breeze nevertheless bores its way through, one instant damp, one instant passionate. There's a basket of roses, tied in lavender ribbon and all at the height of their bloom, on the display table that I didn't notice before. Lovely to look at, for sure. With a few dewdrops upon those blushing petals they'd look exactly like something I would have once presented you with, red and intense, out of the blue. That's probably why I don't like them at all, no, I don't like them at all.

The roses are too red in the first place, they hurt me. They talk to me, even contained nicely in their own basket I can hear them breathe, reaching out for the rain outside. But it's not my place to liberate them by any means. In order to avoid looking at them I walk away from the counter and gaze out of the show window, gold-and-silver dancing above my head, narrowing my eyes to see what's on the opposite side of the street. Condensation on the glass makes it difficult to read what's written above that other door, and I don't want to wipe it off with my sleeve and leave an unsightly smudge as I might have done in my youth. I persevere, and even though I can't quite figure out the purpose of the shop - is it an antiques dealer, a pawnbroker, a lavishly-decorated clothes shop, a place for instruments? - I can see that an antique cello sits by the window.

Raising my hand, I trace in the air around what I can see of the elegant scars on its hips, windowsill cutting them into opposing bass clefs; I 'hmm' out loud and you reciprocate, higher-pitched towards the end, questioning. (I'm not sure whether you expected an answer, or an explanation. Somehow I doubt it. There is none to give, anyway.) My voice is sadly like something that has been passed through a reed, melodic but rusted and besides it is a little too high and _boyish_ \- but yours, yours is the perfect fit for something my voice never was. Your 'hmm' a pitch-perfect G, mine just as perfect yet in a lower octave - though never low enough - aspiring treble clef and bass, bodies curved in a musical welcome.

We were keyed alike, of that I am sure, my lost love.  
Our combinations were a perfect match; our tumblers aligned precisely to give and roll perfectly into the other's empty spaces; upon which we would smile, embrace, and roll over as if in bed to let each other in. And at night, when we were spooned together, the small of your back fitting against my stomach while I held the bow of your hip - that was a homecoming, every time, my knees in the hollows of yours, a master-key fit. No locksmith could have crafted it better.

So when did the blade break in the mouth? When did resistance begin, when did a single lock and key become adequate no longer?

I can't place an exactness to it. You weren't looking for a precise reason when we left each other, and you still don't want one.  
Just as well. The _why_ is almost never that important. How you deal with _what_ and _who_ comes next, that is the struggle.

I think I can feel my phone rustle. I'm proved to be mistaken almost immediately when I pull it out and check, later scrutinizing it further for my own benefit. Its screen winks at me in the light. I scroll through my contacts with quick button presses. So many people to talk to, yet no one who would listen. My thumb pauses and hovers in place when I reach Guy's name - despite his anger, if I called him pleading and weeping, he would come over just so he could reprimand me, put me to bed and give me a great deal of advice.  
I also imagine that he will call you straight afterwards to tell you all about it, and likely while I am watching. That is not a breach of privacy, merely updates that you would listen to and not care about. If you called him, he would do the same, too, and if you are doing well I will not care for much else beyond that. Just for that alone I think it'd be unwise for me to contact him today, though for practical reasons I also can't put it off for too long. It's not fair to him to do this to him now, not when he's so staunchly opposed to (and staying away from) this entire business. He is the go-between that none of us appreciate enough, especially not himself, seeing as he never wanted a part in this in the first place.

I put my phone away. You do the same to yours, pause when you realize we mirrored each other - your brows crease slightly at the realization - but ultimately the phone stays in your pocket and your hands fold slightly in front of your body, fingers twisting lightly to the rhythm of the deburring machine.

You used to say that you wanted a left-handed lover, someone who you could hold hands with while you ate or wrote or worked. The important thing there was the balance: had I been right-handed I would have given up my productivity in this process, and this was not what you wanted. You wanted equality not sacrifice, finding the latter senseless and not very romantic in this day and age - if better things can be done without it, why insist on empty gesture over simple practicality?

There _you_ would be, flicking the pages of a book with your right thumb and index finger.  
There _I_ would be, writing with the letter-paper tilted in a certain way, hand hovering over the surface instead of framing.  
Our unused hands between us, drifting ever so often to settle and close softly around each other, machination of our existence.

Those were the days. But see how we are standing now. The above arrangement only works when I am to your left and you to my right. At this present moment, my left hand is close to your right, close enough that I could clasp it if we both wanted it. That's only romantic in words; in reality that's the arrangement that so blatantly refuses to work. Instead of double efficiency or even single, we both would fail to become even a whole, our less-useful hands waving helplessly in the air. The only options there are staying in less-than-mediocrity together or letting go, and guess which we chose.  
We would bind each other. We'd hold on and it'd be devastatingly beautiful, but we'd go nowhere. There's our problem.

Without you I am a whole, but I don't quite know what to do _about_ it. I've certainly been doing a lot more since we left each other, and I know that you are bemused by this, if not quite resentful. But you see, old love. Creativity is on the side of health; it is not the thing that drives us insane, rather the capacity - the rope - the mechanism that ticks, turns and tries to save us from it. My being filled with angst was not the solution to my problems or creating beauty, it arose up in me like a dam desperately trying to hold back the night terrors. It is not pleasant. It is not desirable. Insanity is no more a key to creation than my own key to my own place, newly obtained and already too-familiar in my palm, is the way to you. Useless now, I understand, in the midst of our turn for the cutting of the keys; this, then back to that place as far away as health. Back to the apartment that is not yours, the one that I cannot yet accept as home and yet must cling to. Back to whiskey, sleep, and Tamiflu.

Is it of any use to unpick the months, back to that second when - for the first time - one of us made a turn that could not dock? When we went nowhere, stuck halfway helplessly twisting about in each other's hands, leaving us waiting the expected click that never came? No matter how we pushed or pulled, we would not budge. Pounding on the door did nothing. Eventually we let go, and there our keys remained suspended in the lock, and we became used to it being wrongly filled. We, my darling, we circled each other, wary, abandoned, full of longing; we came close but we didn't come close enough and now we have pushed each other away forever.

What will become of us, I wonder, looking downwards. Your hand bare, ghost of a ring hovering over your skin, intangible.  
I don't mean that metaphysically, or even out of concern for our own respective healths. I suppose I mean regarding the outside. I imagine it will be full of gossip, exciting to them perhaps, sides being taken in the same old, revolting way. Perhaps we will be consoled by our friends and family, who despite it all must now take sides or take up the hostile silence of the neutral, who will talk of other opportunities and of the sea ahead of us and how vast that sea is. But I think neither of us will buy it, and not because we're lost without each other, or because we were each other's one irrevocable true love. Don't think I am helpless without you, I don't think that for a second any more than I think you will be helpless without me. Far from it. What a selfish, _shallow_ assumption that is, going both ways, to think that our future would be seafoam without each other. No, we will not be reassured because I think it is of the utmost importance that we loved, not anyone else with either of us but you and I. Because I think it's an irrevocable truth that we loved, and when it turns out the world doesn't care for that kind of truth (and it will not, save for reporting our newfound singularity), it will anger the two of us and yet it will not matter.

And that is why you and I have forgiven each other, despite the loathing that was so completely real, and despite the love that was so completely soured. That's why I know that Guy has forgiven you, and indeed maybe never blamed you at all, for making that accusation - because you, old love, you too would be angry with the world that it did not care about you and I. Because borne up on the shoulders of your righteous outrage, he would have been able to see that you truly never meant it, and that you never hated him. He is at once one of our closest judges, and utterly irrelevant to us; let it remain that way, he himself wishes it to be so.

I glance at the door. The last person who was in that queue is here now; his only business here is an inquiry, asking how much a key costs. That reminds me that this wait we've endured, too, is business; I check my wallet but you hold out your hand and stop me, gesturing with your head that you have already paid. (Seven and a half Euros. The price list is actually up on the wall and I saw it immediately after you stopped me.) Other than that you look almost girlishly fascinated, eyes wide and devoid of all negativity as you gaze at the machine, imagining how smoothed-out the key will be when it emerges at last. You would never wish me to cut my palm upon it, despite the grief I caused you. You paid for it, knowing that it is a hefty price for a key that will be useful only once and for a limited amount of time; next month this key will be without a partner again, and I'll make a show of throwing it out, even though I never will.

And why should I, necessarily? Somewhere out there, all over the city, are lonely hearts and singles. I am hardly the only one. This key and I, we will be bachelors together, there is no shame in that. Life is vast and lonely here, always full of equal potential and premonition, and those are the streets of Paris. They have a despair in it, excitement dancing through it, a brutality crushed beneath in its catacombs, poetry pigeon-cooing above it, and all of those things are in us.  
And love. Lucky love. Yes.

_"Voilà!"_

We both flinch. This outsider's speech, we did not expect it. Once the shock's gone, though, I for one am glad.  
A small velvet pouch is produced from a drawer, a locksmith's sweet commissioned grace, the smooth bright key gleaming in it for a second as it drops in that pouch like a dream gone and forgotten. He gives it to me, key and dream, and I take it with a word of thanks. Our business done, we leave, the locksmith's eyes fixed on our backs - he no doubt thinks of us as a couple, likely new, who've just moved into the same apartment and are demanding entry to the same door. (Not quite, Monsieur. That time is past.) The door clangs shut behind us and we look up in unison, seeing the clearing sky, and then at each other. No more queue, nor those who are waiting for something to happen, related to the doors and the opening/shutting of them or not.

The still surface of your gaze, unbroken.

" _Alors_." You say. " _On y va_?"  
" _Allons-y_." I say, but we do not move. The key sits a mini-glacier in my pocket, small but its immense coldness seeping through everything it touches.

This is our new theme, now. Gone are the days when we woke together, buffeted in summer; gone are the times when you set me to music in bed; no more days of sunbathing by the pool, lying on and sharing a patch of sun shimmering over the rug (tickling ourselves something awful), of languid, heavy-lidded completion. No more warmth, only its absence heavy in the air. We will go our separate ways when one of us feels like moving first: you'll go home and wash your hands of me in water turned holy from your touch, and a few miles away, I will swallow a bittersweet pill and dream of the morning. That much we know. I merely wish to observe -  
That it's strange to me, strange, that we should do this now; this cutting of keys, Élodie, just when we're changing all the locks.

**Author's Note:**

> this one's a failure
> 
> i'm bad with human daft punk anything because they make me too sad  
> hoped this would make me less sad but it didn't  
> i don't think i'll write more for them.


End file.
